Brahman

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BRAHMAN

BRAHMAN . In the Vedic hymns the neuter noun bráhman denotes the cosmic principle or power contained in the priestly or inspired utterance. As such, it came to be viewed as embodied in the Veda when the latter was fixed in a body of texts. The masculine form of the word, brahmán, denotes the priest who knows and speaks such utterances; in the later standardized Vedic ritual he is one of the four main priests who, mostly silently, oversees and rectifies errors in the sacrificial proceedings. The derivative term brāhmaṇa has two denotations. One indicates the Vedic prose texts that expound the śrauta ("solemn") ritual; these texts are also known in English as the Brāhmaṇa. The other indicates a person of the first of the four varṇa s, or "castes"; in English this becomes brahman or brahmin. Finally, Brahman or Brahmā is a name for the creator god in Hinduism.

Etymology

Notwithstanding many and various attempts to establish the linguistic derivation of brahman, the question remains unsettled. The old equation with Latin flamen has been vigorously and repeatedly championed by Georges Dumézil. Louis Renou suggests derivation from the root barh (or brah ), which would mean to speak in riddles. Jan Gonda wants to derive brahman from the root bṛh ("to be strong"), a view that he finds supported by the ancient Indian exegetes and that has the advantage of bringing together the two largely interchangeable Vedic divinities Bṛhaspati and Brahmaṇaspati. Paul Thieme, rejecting Gonda's reliance on traditional Indian exegesis, starts from a basic meaning of "form(ing), formulation" and pleads for connecting it with Greek morphē. These, as well as other proposed etymologies, run into formal or semantic difficulties. Much depends on the view one takes of the basic meaning. Consensus tends to look for the basic meaning in the sphere of (sacred) word or formulation, as is in accordance with abundant textual evidence. The main problem, however, is the multi-interpretability of the element brah, which keeps frustrating attempts to arrive at a satisfactory solution.

Mythology

In the Brāhmaṇas and especially in the Upaniṣads, brahman comes to designate the impersonal eternal principle and first cause of the universe. It plays, however, no distinct role in Vedic cosmogony. Its connection—under the form of the god Brahmā—with the cosmogonic myth of the golden germ or egg (hiranyagarbha ) is post-Vedic. In the Laws of Manu (1.5ff.) the golden egg is said to have arisen from Brahmā's seed, which he deposited in the primordial waters. After remaining in this embryonic state, Brahmā is born from the golden egg as the cosmic man, Puruṣa-Nārāyaṇa. The essential point of this and similar passages is that Brahmā as the single principle and cause of the universe is "self-existent" (svayaṃbhū ) and therefore can only put the cosmogonic process into motion by reproducing himself. In the same line of self-reproduction we find the motif of Brahmā's incest with his daughter, Vāc ("speech")—a motif transferred from the Vedic creator god Prajāpati, lord of creatures. Though fused with the cosmic man, Puruṣa, and with Prajāpati, he has not given rise to a cosmogonic myth specific to him. In Hindu cosmology he is either a presiding but inactive deity—not unlike the brahman priest in the sacrificial ritual—or a demiurge who comes into his own only in the second stage of the cosmogony, when the phenomenal world starts its deployment. He is then seated on the lotus that grows out of Viṣṇu's navel, or, again, he is born from the cosmic egg (brahmāṇḍa ).

In the Hindu pantheon, Brahmā is united, as the static center, with the dynamic supreme deities Viṣṇu and Śiva in the trimūrti, the triple form of the divine. Iconographically, he is represented with four bearded heads and four arms. His attributes are the four Vedas, the water vessel, the offering ladle, the rosary (emblems of the brahman), the lotus, and the scepter (or bow), while his mount is the haṃsa or goose. The otherwise abundant Hindu mythology does not, however, give much attention to Brahmā, nor is there clear evidence of a cult. In essence, brahman remained an abstract concept that was elaborated in the Upanisads and the monistic Vedānta philosophy.

Semantic Development

Hermann Oldenberg summarized the general meaning of brahman (neuter) as the sacred formula and the magic power inherent in it ("die heilige Formel und das sie erfüllende Fluidum der Zauberkraft"; 1917, vol. 2, p. 65). Although this is consistent overall with Vedic usage, it still leaves a large distance between sacred formula and the later meaning of principium omnium. Moreover, the Vedic brahman, far from being eternal and immutable, is said to be made or "carpented." Gonda's view of brahman as "power," derived from the verbal root bṛh ("to be strong"), is useful but too general to answer the problem in more precise terms. Thieme's analysis leading to "form(ing), formulation" (Formung, Gestaltung, Formulierung ) as the original meaning, especially in the sense of (improvised) poetic formulation and later (stereotyped) truth formulation, goes a long way toward filling the gap. Renou, apart from the doubtful etymology proposed by him, draws attention to a particular dimension of the formulation. In his view, brahman is distinguished by its enigmatic or paradoxical nature. The brahman, then, is the formulation of the cosmic riddle, a riddle that cannot be solved by a direct answer but only formulated in paradoxical terms that leave the answer—the (hidden) connection (bandhu, nidāna ) between the terms of the paradox—unexpressed. In Renou's felicitous phrase, the brahman is the "énergie connective comprimée en énigmes" (1949, p. 43).

Yet another element must be taken into account in fixing the semantic range of brahman, namely, the verbal contest. This element is preserved, albeit in fixed and ritualized form, in the Brahmodya of the Vedic ritual, especially in the horse sacrifice, or Aśvamedha. It consists of a series of rounds of verbal challenges and responses. In each round two contestants put riddle questions to each other. The point of the riddle contest is to show that one has "seen" or understood the hidden "connection" by responding with a similar, if possible even more artfully contrived, riddle. The one who holds out longest and finally reduces his opponent to silence is the winner, the true brahman, holder of the hidden connection. Hence the importance of silence stressed by Renou. In the elaborate Brahmodya of the horse sacrifice the last round is concluded by the brahman priest who asserts himself, apparently as the winner, with the words: "This brahman is the highest heaven of speech" (brahmāyaṃ vācaḥ paramaṃ vyoma ). In the last resort, then, man as a contestant must place himself in the open gap of the unresolved cosmic riddle and vindicate himself as the live "connection" that holds together the cosmos.

The original Brahmodya, therefore, is not an innocuous riddle game but a matter of life and death. This still transpires in the Brahmodya-like debates of the Upaniṣads, where the losing contestant who fails to submit to his superior opponent and goes on challenging him has to pay for his boldness with his life or, more precisely, with his head. As a contest, the Brahmodya takes its place among other contests, such as chariot races, surviving in fixed, ritualized form. In fact, the Vedic sacrifice itself appears originally to have been a perilous and violent contest for the goods of life. However, the Vedic sacrificial ritual, as the prose texts describe it, is a perfectly peaceful and all but obsessively ordered procedure that has no place for adversaries and real contests. It is the exclusive affair of an individual sacrificer.

This fundamental change is expressed in interesting fashion in a ritualistic myth relating the decisive sacrificial contest between Prajapati and Mrtyu, or Death (Jaiminīya Brāhmaṇa 2.69–2.70). Prajāpati wins his final victory by his "vision" of equivalence that enables him to assimilate his adversary's sacrificial panoply and thereby to eliminate him once and for all. "Since then," the text concludes, "there is no sacrificial contest anymore." But this also meant that the formulation of the cosmic life-death riddle with its hidden connection was replaced with flat and artless statements of equivalence, establishing the identification of the elements of macro- and microcosmos with those of the standardized ritual. Thus the so-called "four hotṛ " (caturhotṛ ) formulas are still said to be "the highest hidden brahman of the gods" and their original context appears indeed to have been the verbal contest. However, in the way these formulas are given in the texts, they are no more than a string of simple identifications—"Thinking is the ladle, thought is the ghee, speech is the altar …"—without mystery or enigma, to be learned and recited by rote. The dynamic tension of the hidden connection has collapsed into flat and static identification. The uncertain outcome of the contest has been replaced by the ritualistic knowledge of him "who knows thus" (ya evam veda ), namely the identifications that concentrated the whole of the universe in the ritual proceedings and, ultimately, in the single sacrifice.

In the context of the ritual's development and fixation the brahman evolves from the visionary formulation of the cosmic riddle to comprise the immutably fixed corpus of Vedic texts. From the subjective truth of the visionary poet it has become the objective truth of the suprahuman, transcendent law of the universe, realized in the ritual and underpinned by identification. This also meant that the function of the brahman (masc.), that is, the speaker or knower of brahman (neuter), was narrowed down to that of the mostly silent brahman priest in the ritual, while the brāhmaṇa became (ideally) the human carrier of the Veda (hence the scriptural stress on its oral preservation and transmission by the brahman).

At the same time, the brahman kept up its intimate connection with speech, which gave rise to the later speculations on the primordial utterance as the cosmic principle (śabda-brahman ) and to philosophy of language, as well as to grammatical description.

On the other hand, identification made it possible to concentrate the whole of the spoken and acted proceedings of the ritual in the person of the single sacrificer, who in this way internalizes the whole of the ritual, that is, the transcendent cosmic order, and so becomes identical with brahman. This was already prefigured in the brahman who, as we saw, identifies himself with "the highest heaven of speech." Here the development leads over to the Upanisadic doctrine of the unity of ātman, the principle of individuation or the individual "soul," and brahman, which gave rise to the monistic philosophy of the Vedānta.

Bibliography

The most original view of brahman is presented by Louis Renou (with the collaboration of Liliane Silburn) in "Sur la notion de brahman," Journal asiatique 237 (1949): 7–46, reprinted in his L'Inde fondamentale (Paris, 1978). Jan Gonda's Notes on Brahman (Utrecht, 1950) brings in anthropological materials concerning power concepts. He is criticized by Paul Thieme, who presents a balanced view of the semantic development, in "Brahman," Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 102 (1952): 91–129, reprinted in Thieme's Kleine Schriften, vol. 1 (Wiesbaden, 1971). For a discussion of Gonda's and Thieme's views, see also Hanns-Peter Schmidt's Bṛhaspati und Indra (Wiesbaden, 1968), pp. 16–22, 239ff. The element of verbal contest is stressed in my essay "On the Origin of the Nāstika," Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde Sud- und Ost-asiens 12–13 (1968–1969): 171–185, which has been revised and reprinted in my The Inner Conflict of Tradition (Chicago, 1985). For the equation of flamen and brahman, see Georges Dumézil's Flamen-Brahman (Paris, 1935); see also the Revue de l'histoire des religions 38 and 39 for Dumézil's responses to criticism. For Oldenberg's views, see his Die Religion des Veda (Stuttgart, 1917) and his Kleine Schriften (Wiesbaden, 1967), pp. 1127–1156. A critical survey of the various etymologies is to be found in Manfred Mayrhofer's Kurzgefasstes etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altindischen, vol. 2 (Heidelberg, 1963), pp. 453–456.

The philosophical developments and the concept of sabda-brahman are discussed in Madeleine Biardeau's Théorie de la connaissance et philosophie de la parole dans le brahmanisme classique (Paris, 1964).